A Late-Night Sea Shanty
by Kanthia
Summary: A chance encounter leads to a short conversation between two travellers. Wind Waker; oneshot.


Set mostly near the end of Wind Waker: whenever there is a meeting, a parting is sure to follow. I'm an outdoor educator (among other things), so I spent a lot of this game thinking about exposure, and sunlight, and the smell of the sea.

* * *

**A Late-Night Sea Shanty**

A bit of bad luck and a careless love for danger got Kiv out to sea, making a half-decent living shipping parcels too large for Rito to carry in a ship she'd bought with her last handful of rupees. It was a tiny thing, the _Queen of the Sea_, but it had a rudder strong enough to give it some move on still days, and a tiny cabin where she stored her goods and, occasionally, herself, when it was safe enough to catch a few minutes of sleep. Pirates usually left her alone, she had a few harpoons with ropes attached to the stern in case of sharks and octos. Yeah, it was a lonely life on the sea, but heck, some of those sunsets were worth it.

She was in the third month of her career when the Endless Night happened - some folks swore it was just everyone freaking out over the unseasonably bad weather, but she was certain that the night had dragged on way longer than it should have. Lucky for her, she was docked that night at Windfall Island, and found lodging after making friends with some pirates at the bar. Later, the old men whispered that the end was nigh, and the women gossiped about missing children. Kiv, who had once seen a Helmaroc the size of a mountain fly over her, said nothing and contracted a shipment of steel letter boxes to Dragon Roost Island.

Life was about dealing with crazy things as they happened, but it kept her busy. The Endless Night never repeated itself, at least. She was at Dragon Roost Island when a beacon cut through the night, and a giant tower popped out of the ocean - why not? Wanting to be sure that this wasn't some kind of world-ending catastrophe that was going to cut into her profits, she asked around if anything weird had happened lately, learned from a one of the Rito priestesses that a warrior in green was sailing around solving problems for people. As if a giant tower under the ocean was a problem. Whatever. She contracted a load of bombs to Outset Island, and life went on.

There were a bunch more jobs after that - people were getting antsy and afraid of testing their luck in the ocean, started stockpiling weapons, which she was only too glad to ship for them - and a month or two passed, almost happily. On a crescent-moon night near Spectacle Island a couple of pirates decided to see if they could get at the contents of her cabin (at that time, a few barrels of gunpowder), and she would have been fish food had someone with a cannon not popped out from behind the island and laid waste to her pursuers.

"Hey, thanks," she called to the ship, when the carnage was over. For a single-person junk it sure had a good hand manning the cannon. The boat wasn't moving - whoever was in there had rigged up a grappling hook on their boom for salvaging - so she coasted over.

"Hey," she said, again. The kid in the boat (couldn't have been older than fifteen) jumped at the sound of her voice, then relaxed. Typical Outsetter, from the colour of his garb, though she had always thought they took it off after the coming-of-age thing was done.

"Ah, no problem," he said, turning away to secure the rigging. "Seemed like it would have been wrong to leave you alone." They were both silent as the hook splashed into the water, and out of the corner of her eye, she swore that the figurehead on his ship had turned to watch.

"Erm, that's a weird boat you've got there, if you don't mind me sayin'. Build it yourself?"

The hook hit the bottom; he gave the rope an experimental tug, then started to hoist. "Sort of. Not really." A strange grunting sound made _her_ jump, before she realized that the figurehead had turned to look straight at her. The boy in the boat laughed. "I don't think he appreciates you calling him weird, though. This is the King of Red Lions."

"Um, hello, there. I'm Kiv, and, uh, this is the _Queen of the Sea_." An enchanted boat, then. She'd seen weirder, but not much weirder.

He hauled his spoils on board - a purple rupee, not bad for a short firefight. "I'm Link. Nice to meetcha."

It was a calm night and she was in no rush, and besides, on the ocean, you showed gratitude to people who saved your necks. She had some spiced hardtack she'd been saving for a rainy, windless night, so she broke it out with some ale, the latter of which he politely refused.

She told him about her business, and he said he was a traveller. All the while she wondered how he managed in a boat without a cabin - all that exposure tended to drive people a little nuts. Only pirates could stand it, and they didn't care about the briny smell that clung to hair, clothes, buried itself into your nostrils, until all one could smell was the sea. He seemed like the kind of kid who brought the ocean with him wherever he went, and the thought made her a little sad, for some strange reason. Those were the kind of people who headed out to sea and never went home.

That was a pretty big sword for a kid so young.

"Hey," she said, after a while. "You wanna compare sea charts? I have a couple of small islands in the northeast marked, might have treasure on 'em if you're headed that way."

Sharing sea charts was a fairly common practice among the non-pirate folks, but the kid and his boat exchanged quick glances, and then he shook his head. "Sorry," he said. "I'm looking for some pretty secret stuff, and I'm afraid of -"

"-Pirates? Yeah, I get it. It's alright." Some people were more paranoid than others. For his age, he was pretty wordly. "Well, if you don't mind me asking, what's this super secret thing you're looking for?"

He looked off, to somewhere else. "Something broken," he said finally. "I'm looking for the pieces, so I can fix an old mess."

"Sounds like a lot of responsibility for someone working alone."

He shrugged, fished a baton out of his pocket. "I do what I can. Thanks for the food."

"Anytime." She grinned; he smiled back. On the ocean, meetings and partings often happened in the same breath, and there was no guarantee that either of them would be alive for another chance encounter. She saluted, gave him the old sailor's line: "May the wind be always at your back."

"And the wind be at yours." He hoisted his sail, hummed the first few bars of an old sea shanty and motioned with his baton in the shape of the Great Triangle, a constellation that guided travellers, and marked the Goddesses' power. A wind from the west blew in, and he sailed off, towards the dawn.


End file.
